Read the Web
Research Project at Carnegie Mellon University

NELL: Never-Ending Language Learning

Browse the Knowledge Base!

Can computers learn to read? We think so. "Read the Web" is a research project that attempts to create a computer system that learns over time to read the web. Since January 2010, our computer system called NELL (Never-Ending Language Learner) has been running continuously, attempting to perform two tasks each day:

• First, it attempts to "read," or extract facts from text found in hundreds of millions of web pages (e.g., playsInstrument(George_Harrison, guitar)).
• Second, it attempts to improve its reading competence, so that tomorrow it can extract more facts from the web, more accurately.

So far, NELL has accumulated over 50 million candidate beliefs by reading the web, and it is considering these at different levels of confidence. NELL has high confidence in 2,810,379 of these beliefs — these are displayed on this website. It is not perfect, but NELL is learning. You can track NELL's progress below or @cmunell on Twitter, browse and download its knowledge base, read more about our technical approach, or join the discussion group.

Recently-Learned Facts

instance	iteration	date learned	confidence
prescription_breast is a muscle	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
solidbody is a musical instrument	1111	06-jul-2018	96.0
contact_library_administration is a visualizable object	1111	06-jul-2018	99.0
robert_vaughn_and_david_mccallum ia a celebrity	1111	06-jul-2018	90.6
aug__03 is a date	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
washington_d_c_ is a city that lies on the river snake	1113	15-aug-2018	99.3
greg_nickels is the leader of the city seattle	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
us_navy is headquartered in the country us	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
national is a company that has an office in the country greece	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
flexor a muscle located in bodypart forearm	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9